It absolutely is. Turbolinks’ bad rap is from earlier days and was partially due to just a different JS landscape where certain patterns relied on a hard refresh to not have memory leaks as you change page, or other odd behaviors.

I was one of many devs that would always setup new Rails projects without Turbolinks. Last year, I started a new product at work with a slim team and an eye on simplifying our tech and processes. This included giving Turbolinks and Stimulus a try.

Long story short, it was simple and straightforward and has a notable impact on perceived performance after the initial page load. We had a great experience with it.

These days with Turbolinks 5 it’s quite straightforward. There are some gotchas, but the readme covers various edge cases pretty thoroughly.

Since that project, I’ve gone solo and am working on my own commercial endeavor - and while I’ve been building large scale SPAs since before they were called RIAs, my new product is sure enough using Turbolinks (+ Stimulus).

My understanding is that Turbolinks 6 is coming soon that should be better, still.

I don't think you would need to know ins and outs of Turbolinks to leverage it in your app. It's a simple drop-in library which replaces `body` inner HTML instead of a full refresh in case of page navigation.

Its actual aim is to provide SPA like experience without modern JS complexity which is ideal for solo devs/small teams.

Also, it is worth noting that they are using Stimulusjs framework with Turbolinks.

I'm a long time Rails guy. Sadly at any sufficient size of an application, I end up disabling Turbolinks.

Every time, I want it to work but you as you mentioned there's a few gotchas here and there that catch me unaware that cause me to shy away.

In the rails JS camp though is StimulusJS. I swear by this for developers that want a bit of JS sugar but don't need the full suite of Vue or React.

Basecamp/37signals are the creators of Turbolinks (and of course Rails itself).

Coming from nodejs, I'm considering building my next project in rails. I'm tired of having too many choices.

I would love for someone with more experience to to answer your question.